The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2 eBook

everything. I can visit a sick friend. I
can interrupt the man of much occupation when he is
busiest. I can insult over him with an invitation
to take a day’s pleasure with me to Windsor
this fine May-morning. It is Lucretian pleasure
to behold the poor drudges, whom I have left behind
in the world, carking and caring; like horses in a
mill, drudging on in the same eternal round—­and
what is it all for? A man can never have too
much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had
I a little son, I would christen him NOTHING-TO-DO;
he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe,
is out of his element as long as he is operative.
I am altogether for the life contemplative. Will
no kindly earthquake come and swallow up those accursed
cotton mills? Take me that lumber of a desk there,
and bowl it down

As low as to the fiends.

I am no longer ******, clerk to the Firm of &c.
I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in
trim gardens. I am already come to be known by
my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating
at no fixed pace, nor with any settled purpose.
I walk about; not to and from. They tell me,
a certain cum dignitate air, that has been buried
so long with my other good parts, has begun to shoot
forth in my person. I grow into gentility perceptibly.
When I take up a newspaper, it is to read the state
of the opera. Opus operatum est. I have
done all that I came into this world to do. I
have worked task work, and have the rest of the day
to myself.

THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING

It is an ordinary criticism, that my Lord Shaftesbury,
and Sir William Temple, are models of the genteel
style in writing. We should prefer saying—­of
the lordly, and the gentlemanly. Nothing can be
more unlike than the inflated finical rhapsodies of
Shaftesbury, and the plain natural chit-chat of Temple.
The man of rank is discernible in both writers; but
in the one it is only insinuated gracefully, in the
other it stands out offensively. The peer seems
to have written with his coronet on, and his Earl’s
mantle before him; the commoner in his elbow chair
and undress.—­What can be more pleasant than
the way in which the retired statesman peeps out in
the essays, penned by the latter in his delightful
retreat at Shene? They scent of Nimeguen, and
the Hague. Scarce an authority is quoted under
an ambassador. Don Francisco de Melo, a “Portugal
Envoy in England,” tells him it was frequent
in his country for men, spent with age or other decays,
so as they could not hope for above a year or two of
life, to ship themselves away in a Brazil fleet, and
after their arrival there to go on a great length,
sometimes of twenty or thirty years, or more, by the
force of that vigour they recovered with that remove.
“Whether such an effect (Temple beautifully
adds) might grow from the air, or the fruits of that
climate, or by approaching nearer the sun, which is